[whyrusleeping]

Hi, i'm the guy who built IPFS and Filecoin which are moderately large decentralized networks, and both me and Martin Kleppmann are technical advisors to the project. Additionally, Jeremie Miller (of XMPP) is on the board. The core team consists of developers who have many years of experience working on decentralized technologies (Jay, Paul, and Daniel have been in that space for a long time) and the others have plenty of other relevant experience (Including Docker and the Internet Archive).

Sure, nobody has ever built a decentralized social network at scale before, but we're not blundering our way into this.

[Kye]

I was asking about their specific claim. People bring all kinds of genuinely impressive credentials to efforts like this and still can't pull it off. I've used just about every social network since the first, and it seems like the problems are always human, not technology. Social networks seem to bring together and amplify all the problems of every other technology. It's the final boss and no one's cracked it.

You gave me a list of people and technologies they worked on, but you didn't answer the question. How do you bring that together into a decentralized system that can absorb and succeed Twitter?

[whyrusleeping]

While I totally get where you’re coming from, its a bit of an unfair question, “how are you going to do the thing you are attempting to do??” Is hard to answer without just saying “watch and see”, but ill try.

From a technical perspective the architecture is very similar to Twitter or other social networks internally, just pieced apart with some cryptography added to allow different components to not have to fully trust eachother. Thats to say, the components individually scale the same as twitter does (probably better tbh, we’re building this with 2023 tech not 2005 tech). Im happy to dive into that more but I actually dont think the technology is the hard part.

The bulk of the work is culture and community building and maintenance. One of the biggest things we’ve been focused on getting right is moderation, and the federated architecture helps a lot here. Allowing “third party” labeling to be integrated into the experience seamlessly allows communities to choose their own way of curating their experience. Instead of relying on a single company to dictate “the rules” you just pick “the rules” you want and go from there. There’s obviously a lot more to it, so id encourage you to check out some of our other blog posts: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog

[archagon]

Has the team written anything about the architecture and/or guiding philosophy of Mastodon vs. Bluesky? Scanned the blog but couldn’t find anything.

EDIT: I see https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub was linked below, but it would be nice to read something a bit more in-depth than that.